Man talk

I am going to confess something to you now that you probably would never have noticed, and it's that I have a hard time remembering to give Walter eyebrows. I haven't any idea why. Maybe on some level I don't want to mar the featureless expanse of his pate. I'm getting better, but as you can see I sometimes still forget. However, that fourth panel is one of my favorite drawings of him ever. Faithful to my wife? I lobotomized the president's sister, are you even listening? I thought you'd be proud!

Dr. Keen records in his memoirs the strange case of a woman, courted by two men, who quarreled with the one she really loved and out of spite agreed to marry the other. The very night of the wedding she went insane, and the form of her insanity was that except when asleep she could not stop walking. Around and around and around the house she went, sometimes eating as she walked. The husband came to Dr. Keen and asked him to testify in court that he had grounds for divorce because his wife was mad. Dr. Keen told the husband that he had taken a vow and was obliged to honor it, though he reports that he gave the matter serious thought and felt very bad for the young man, because his married life was bound to be a misery. Still, what else could he do? The marriage vow was sacred.

The unsmothered child, incidentally, is still alive: her name is Angelene Forester, née Ionesco, and you can see parts of an interview with her here, which I recommend, because it's very interesting (and she has a lovely voice). She doesn't mention the part where her mother tried to kill her, but I have seen an interview in which she does. "And one day she tried to...um. Smother me." She was four when her mother was lobotomized and used to sit on Walter's lap (he always got along splendidly with children) and tug on his beard. Man, everyone was wild about that beard.